I encourage my children and other young persons to be better than my best.

Many parents feel resentful when their offspring shine where they never could, achieve what they never dared, and aspire to be what they never even conceived of being. Many parents feel threatened by their child’s good looks, popularity, and healthy self-esteem. When a child flourishes in an aspect of their life that a parent feels insecure about in theirs, the potential for rivalry, control issues, and emotional abuse arises. Many insecure adults relate to their children with an air of competition. If there must be any competition between parent and child it should either be in good fun or in order for the child to learn to succeed and surpass their parent competitor.

The spiritual reality of the parent-child relationship is this– children are supposed to become better humans than their parents. Every generation should be better at being human than the previous. Such is the essence of evolution. Everything that a parent models is intended to offer their child a chance to become more loving and more successful in life. As parents it is our responsibility to encourage our children to be better than we are… in every way. And when they are, we need not be threatened. We can smile and know we have done our job well. If our children are more successful, more compassionate, more creative, more authentic, more courageous, more independent, more secure, smarter, stronger and happier than we have ever been, we can be very proud.

Today I intend to see the world as a playground where I will let my inner child out to play.

The inner child is often only given his or her due consideration when an issue is being worked through or a trauma is being healed. Few have escaped childhood without some emotional wound- and while it’s valuable to reclaim and love that inner child into our healing- he or she can offer us something else, something equally valuable. That little boy or little girl who permanently resides in each of us doesn’t just hold pain, he or she also holds joy, abandon, wonder, and a true sense of play. Let’s not only hold those inner children as precious victims but also as mighty examples of how to live life fully. Let’s let our inner little boys and girls go out today and have some fun. Let them remind us how to laugh at ourselves, how to make messes we can be proud of and how to be generous and forgiving.

Every time you have a thought you plant a seed in your mind that has the potential to grow and become part of your physical experience. This is how you create your world, your tomorrows and your next moments, with your thoughts, planting one seed at a time. The attention we give to those thought-seeds is the fertilizer they need to grow. If a thought merely passes through one’s consciousness, it is unlikely to ever become a manifested experience. But if a thought-seed is fed one’s attention, it is being nurtured and it will begin to grow roots. When the attention we place on our thought-seed is imbued with emotion, we are feeding it with the most powerful fertilizer and is likely to sprout into physical reality. If I have a thought such as, “I am without love.” I have planted a “without love” seed. If I give that thought-seed my continued attention and focus, and if I have strong emotions accompanying my attention, that seed will likely become a manifested experience of being or feeling “without love” in my physical world. This is why it can be so hard to lift ourselves out of a negative state of mind. Every negative thought plants a seed that produces more of the same, leaving us spiraling in a difficult direction. This is also why it is so important to think thoughts of what we want, what we love, what we hope for more of, what we dream of having, and of what is right, functioning, and abundant in our lives. By planting positive thought-seeds, we are growing more of what we love, want, and are grateful for in our lives and experiences. No one grows corn by planting onions.